How to configure a multi-lingual site in Ektron

Ektron CMS is a fully multi-lingual product that allows multiple different language versions of a content item to be created.  As of version 8.5 you can also create regions and add custom languages.  Even without the features of v8.5 you can still create multi-lingual sites easily.

When beginning an Ektron project that requires multi-lingual content, first decide whether you are running one domain or multiple domains.  Some organisations like to have one domain such as http://www.theglobalfund.org and within this domain the user can select the language that they wish to view the site in.  Other organisations such as http://www.selecta.co.uk/ provide region/country specific websites which may or may not then provide the option to choose a language.

Single domain multi-lingual sites

Having just one domain is certainly the easiest to implement but is not sufficient for organisations that wish to have a regional presence.  If you have just one domain you would typically provide a language switching control on the page which can use either the CMS LanguageAPI control or some custom API code.

With one domain, many websites will use a language identifier as part of the url; for example http://www.mywebsite.com/en-gb.  This can be achieved using Taxonomy automatic aliasing; the top category in your taxonomy would be “en-gb” and within that would be your information architecture.  Taxonomies themselves are multi-lingual so can be translated.  The “en-gb” taxonomy would be translated into “fr-fr” for French (France) and “fr-ch” for French (Switzerland).  If you also setup your taxonomy folder relationships then content can be auto-added into the taxonomy meaning your multi-lingual aliases are completely automatic!

A language identifier in your alias is useful as it helps to prevent different language versions of content items having the same alias.

Multi-domain multi-lingual sites

Ektron CMS provides a means to manage many websites from a single CMS installation called Multi-site.  Essentially you have more than one IIS website, each with its own web root but only one database.  The reason behind doing this is so that each website can have its own default language.  If you had http://www.mywebsite.de, chances are you want the default language to be German.  The CMS sets the default language of a site within its web.config file.  As you can only have one web.config file per .Net website this means you need separate sites in IIS.

So you would first install the “parent” site – this is the base to which all of your multi-sites are added.  The parent site would hold common content that is shared amongst the other “child” websites.  Each of the child multi-sites are then added using the dedicated Ektron Multi-site installer.  The child multi-sites also have to be configured within the Workarea by right-clicking on the root folder and choosing “Add Site”.

Remember that any content you add within the child site folder in the Workarea will have the domain of the site added to the start of the QuickLink.  This only happens within multi-site folders.  If you do not want this to happen then add the content to a non-multi-site folder, i.e. a folder belonging to the “parent”.

It is your choice whether these sites have their own ASPX templates, controls and PageBuilder wireframes.  Usually the physical files are the same so that organisations have a consistent look and feel across websites even if the domains are slightly different.

For more information on Ektron multi-site see here.

Disable Language Awareness

It is worth mentioning that your Url Aliasing settings.  In the workarea, go to Settings > Configuration > Url Aliasing > Settings and check the “Disable Language Awareness” button.  I find the wording of this setting to be confusing.  When “Disable Language Awareness” is checked you can browse to an alias from a non-default language piece of content.  If it is not checked then the CMS will attempt to load the alias using the default language – so if the alias does not exist in the default language you will get a 404 page not found error.

Time to add content

So you should now have an idea for how to approach setting up Ektron CMS for multi-lingual websites.  You may want to review Ektron’s documentation on multi-lingual content to make sure you have all bases covered; there are other items such as menus, images, taxonomies, etc to consider.

Event log error from Ektron aliasing module

Have you ever seen this error in your event viewer on an Ektron site?

Message:Resource not found Stack trace:  

   at Ektron.Cms.UrlAliasing.StaticFileHandler.
_GetFileInfo(String filename)
at Ektron.Cms.UrlAliasing.StaticFileHandler.System.Web.
IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext ctxt)
at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.
System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute()
at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep
step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)

It can be tricky to figure out what this is all about as the error message doesn’t say what the file is that is missing.  I had this recently on a site and figured out what it was by trawling through the IIS logs.  I found a number of 404 Page Not Found errors that corresponded to the messages in the event viewer.

Strangely enough, it turned out to be a missing fav.icon file!

For a while I was sure it meant there was a template missing.  I can’t guarantee that it will be fav.icon in every case, but its worth hitting the IIS logs to see if you can match 404 errors to the event viewer.